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The Grasshopper Lost Its Wings
The Grasshopper Lost Its Wings is a historical fiction novel with strong elements of romance, immigrant drama, and political suspense. It follows Chapu, a poor young juice vendor in Mexico City, and Tere, a university student from a wealthier family, as their tender love story becomes tangled in class pressure, family expectations, the assassination of Luis Donaldo Colosio, exile, guilt, and the long ache of becoming someone new in another country. At its heart, this is a story about love, survival, and the heavy cost of chasing a life that keeps asking you to leave pieces of yourself behind.
I liked the way the novel refuses to keep love simple. Chapu and Tere’s relationship begins with sweetness, saved parking spots, fresh juice, inside jokes, music, and that bright feeling of being seen. Then the world crowds in. Money matters. Class matters. Politics matters. Fear matters. I liked that the author lets those pressures build slowly instead of treating them like background noise. Mexico City feels alive in the book, full of traffic, food, myth, old wounds, family rules, and sudden beauty. The use of Mexica, Nahua, Totonac, and Mayan legends gives the story a larger shape, as if the characters are living inside both modern history and older stories about fate, sacrifice, transformation, and loss.
I also found the author’s choices ambitious, sometimes almost overflowing. The book moves from campus romance to political conspiracy to immigrant survival story, and that gives it a wide emotional range. Some scenes are intimate and warm, while others are tense, brutal, or deeply sad. Chapu’s journey in the United States was especially effective for me because it shows success as something complicated. He makes money. He builds a life. He finds chosen family. But he is still lonely, still afraid, still carrying Mexico in his bones. That felt honest. I did sometimes feel the novel wanted to do many things at once, but I also respected that largeness. Life is messy, and this book leans into the mess instead of smoothing it out.
I would recommend The Grasshopper Lost Its Wings to readers who enjoy historical fiction that blends romance, political history, family drama, and immigrant experience. It will especially appeal to readers interested in Mexico in the 1990s, cross-class love stories, and novels where personal choices are shaped by forces much larger than the characters themselves. This is not a light romance, even when it is romantic. It is a reflective, sorrowful, and heartfelt novel about what people survive, what they regret, and what they finally have to release.
Pages: 291 | ASIN : B0GRVPKKX6
The Atmosphere of War
Sawadika American Girl follows an American teenager in Vietnam War-era Bangkok, as music, first love, and shared sorrow help her find a place for grief, longing, and belonging. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
Most people aren’t aware that during the Vietnam War, Thailand served as a major US military outpost, with over eight military bases scattered throughout the kingdom. In addition, thousands of American families lived in Bangkok with fathers who worked for the American Embassy, USAID, the CIA, the US Military, and as private contractors. All in direct or indirect support of the war effort. On top of that, in 1968, the year my novel takes place, nearly 5,000 GI’s were pouring into Bangkok each month on R&R, bringing their turmoil with them. This created a ‘little America’ that was complex and combustible and often at odds with Thai sensibilities and culture. Having grown up in Thailand, I understood these underlying tensions and knew it was fertile ground for a story. Making it a coming-of-age story with a 17-year-old female protagonist struck me as a powerful and unexpected way to shed light on this overlooked pocket of history.
Music feels central to Piper’s emotional life; how did you approach writing piano as both technique and feeling?
Music anchors Piper emotionally in a world that doesn’t make sense. The act of playing the piano becomes a private space where she works out her emotions. Her piano teacher is a Thai Prince who had studied with the great Chilean pianist Claudio Arrau. Arrau’s technique was legendary for centering the body for maximum emotional expression. This is what the Prince teaches Piper. Her efforts to master this technique symbolize her struggle to come to terms with what is going on in her life.
The character of the Thai Prince who studied with Arrau is based on a piano teacher I had. There was a vibrant classical music scene in Bangkok at this time. Renowned musicians had Bangkok on their concert tours. This made sense because the Thai King was a talented jazz musician and composed his own music. And as a young girl, the Queen studied classical piano in Paris. I love that thread of the story because no one expects it, but it is absolutely true.
Jack and Piper’s relationship is brief but deeply affecting. What did you want their connection to reveal about war, loneliness, and belonging?
Life is always precious. But war, even the atmosphere of war, perverts that value, making life more precious and less precious at the same time. Piper and Jack experience this intensity from different vantage points, but each is tuned in to the sense of loneliness and dislocation that proximity to war brings. Most of the story unfolds during a single week, about the length of a soldier’s R&R. Under such conditions, time stretches. Three, four, or even five days together mean everything. That perception of time is woven into the fabric of their relationship.
How did you balance the intimate story of Piper’s coming of age with the larger historical forces surrounding her?
The bulk of the novel unfolds over a single week in 1968. That is on purpose. The assassinations of MLK and Robert Kennedy had happened, the Tet Offensive had occurred, and the casualty rate for soldiers and civilians in Vietnam was at a high point. All of that darkened the mood for Americans working in Bangkok. There were tensions with the Thai government. As a dependent, this increased the pressure for Piper to behave a certain way and not put a foot wrong. That kind of control is at odds with an individual’s ability to come of age, which is by definition about asserting one’s independence in a way that produces some kind of personal and intimate transformation. This put Piper on a collision course with the forces around her.
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One night, Piper ditches the American Teen Club to party with an older crowd. Sparks fly when she meets Jack, a 19-year-old GI on R&R from Vietnam. Defying the Army’s non-fraternization policy, they pledge to spend his leave together. As the hypocrisy of the war closes in on them, Jack’s name surfaces in a drug investigation and Piper discovers a disturbing truth about her father, forcing both to decide what they are willing to risk for a few more days together.
Sawadika American Girl is the story of a young American woman coming-of-age on the periphery of a brutal, unjust war.
